Who is Participating?

This means that we are not dealing with an Acrobat problem: The application probably also crashes when you print to any other PostScript printer that uses the Adobe PostScript driver.

Creating a PDF file with the Adobe PDF printer is a two-step process: First, the data is printed to a PostScript printer (that uses the Distiller PPD and the Adobe PostScript printer - the Distiller PPD is a very simple PPD, and therefore much easier to "digest" than the PPD for a "real" PS printer). Once the PostScript file is created, it is spooled to a special port monitor that feeds the file to Distiller. When you select "Print to file", you are ignoring the second step, and just creating the PostScript file. The only software components involved in this are Access, the Adobe PostScript driver and (but I almost don't want to call this software) the Distiller PPD.

Do you have any other PostScript printers installed on these machines? Are they using the Adobe PS driver, or the Microsoft PS driver (that's the one that comes with the operating system)? If you don't have any Adobe PS drivers, download the driver from Adobe's Download page (http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=44&platform=Windows) and run it.
Select "Printer is directly connected", select the "File" port, and select to "Browse" to the printer driver. You can use any of the drivers that you can download from the download link from above, or you can use the "Generic PostcScript Driver" that comes with the driver.

Does this also crash Access? (that is, when you print to this new printer)

another post:
"I had a very similar problem, and the solution I found, at least for WindowsXP, was that you can reassign a printer port for the Adobe PDF printer to whatever folder you would like to save the files to. Then, when the file dialog box is disabled, the file will go to the folder you specified in the port setup, and the file will be named after the report itself.
Then, you can simply modify the code to look for the file in the right location and the specific filename, and you don't have to mess around with moving it if you don't want to."

Use the "Adobe PDF" printer, but check the "Print to File" checkbox. This will intercept the PostScript file that would otherwise be sent to Distiller. Does this still crash Acrobat? I don't propose this as a workaround, but this will help to narrow down what's causing this problem.